How Bill.com™ addresses customer issues before they arise

Starting and running a new business is tough, but there are tools and services that can ease the process. Bill.com is one such service, automating and simplifying online B2B communication, invoicing, and billing for companies of all sizes—even accounting firms and banks. Business owners can rest easier with less overhead, paperwork, and opportunity for human error.

Founded in 2006, Bill.com is the brainchild of Rene Lacerte, a Silicon Valley veteran with decades of experience in the finance, software, and payments industries. By 2017, the Palo Alto-based company can count more than 2.5 million members and has doubled down on its commitment to providing consistent, cutting-edge customer service.

Before implementing Zendesk in 2015, Bill.com used Oracle RightNow, but found that RightNow didn’t offer enough flexibility or the option to combine channels into one system, said Director of Customer Support, Ashish Patel. At the time, the Bill.com support org was structured in such a way that they kept a close watch on contact volumes and ensuring that the team could provide swift answers. But they knew that important customer insights were falling by the wayside.

“We shifted our philosophy,” Patel explained. “Now we’re looking at what’s actually happening with the customer wherever they are in their journey with us. We want to optimize our support organization and customer experience to ensure that the customer’s needs are being met, maybe even before they even know they have a need.”

For example, a new customer asking how to create a bill is likely going to return with a few more questions in the coming days. With more insight into the individual customer journey, the agent can proactively serve up helpful resources on that first contact.

This desire led Bill.com to search for another solution and to adopt Zendesk Support, Guide, and Chat for streamlined, omnichannel support.

“Zendesk has become a one-stop shop for us, and has allowed us to be strategic in ways we might not have been able to be with other software providers,” said Patel. “Our solution with Zendesk has created this ecosystem that gives us a single source of truth from a customer support standpoint, but that has also helped us optimize the agent experience inside the organization.”

The Bill.com customer service organization includes 50 agents providing service Monday – Friday from 5 a.m. to 6 p.m.—during typical business hours—through email, live chat, and scheduled phone calls. Bill.com has also invested in self-service; customers will only submit a ticket or initiate a chat after they’ve visited the Bill.com help center.

Now that agents can see key customer information and all support history in Zendesk, agents are better prepared to anticipate customer needs. “If they’re brand new, we know they’ll have certain ‘getting started related’ questions, whereas if it’s been past 30 days we know they’ll have more advanced questions,” Patel explained. All new agents are also trained on the current top customer concerns, which they now have insight into through Support’s native analytics and a custom dashboard the team built using the Zendesk API.

Bill.com sees the majority—a whopping 80 percent—of its 18,000 monthly ticket volume come through live chat. Agents are held to high SLAs: answering all emails within one business day, 80 percent of chats in less than 120 seconds, and 80 percent of (scheduled) calls within 60 minutes. Across the board, the team has an 80 percent adherence rate to those SLAs, Patel said, along with high CSAT ratings: 95 percent for chat and 90 percent for email.

From an operational standpoint, support leadership takes the approach of setting small goals for agents that contribute to larger goals.

“You set micro-goals for the agents to reach within an hour, and if you reach those milestones then you’ve met the daily goal, and then you’ve met the weekly goal, then the monthly, then yearly, and so on,” Patel said.

To help with process efficiencies, Bill.com has implemented several integrations into their Zendesk instance. Through a custom-built integration utilizing the Zendesk API, customers who require extra help can schedule a callback with an agent. Another in-house tool helps to capture customer information when they first contact Bill.com to ensure efficient routing. One key integration from the Zendesk Apps Marketplace is Tymeshift, which helps streamline agent scheduling and performance and saves the team valuable time.

“We’ve cut our scheduling time from two and a half hours a week to 60 minutes. The integration with Tymeshift has allowed us to focus more time on coaching and growing the team,” Patel said.

In addition to serving a wide customer base, Bill.com operates eight brands, which are segmented in Zendesk using the Multibrand feature. Additionally, by integrating Zendesk Guide with their UI platform and Bill.com Connect, the team is working on connecting a custom-built Content Management System (CMS) to Zendesk so that agents can write content in Guide for specific subjects and brands and then push that content to the CMS. “We’ll essentially have the whole customer support team writing content,” Patel said.

The end goal is to take all customer insights and share them back to the sales and product development teams so that Bill.com can execute on its overarching goal of anticipating customer needs.

“Incorporating these top (contact) volume drivers into conversations with customers to reach them before they even know they have a question is what we’re trying to get at,” Patel said. “If we know what’s coming and anticipating their needs, why not empower our customers?”

“Zendesk has become a one-stop shop for us, and has allowed us to be strategic in ways we might not have been able to be with other software providers.”